Wallace Stevens Bio

Wallace Stevens 1879 –1955

Married to a figure etched, immortalized

In currency. Father to a little girl dreaming of

Ice cream emperors. Or maybe not.

Not only a man, but merely a poet.

He sees, understands, and encompasses

All things, every contradiction within

Himself, within the world. It is he. 

The order, the chaos of creation, which

Is to say the transmutation of forms

The constant metamorphosis to find

What will suffice. To find the thing that speaks

And gives satisfaction, a sound that lingers

Stroking and soothing the wearied ear, normally

Sick, and filled with monotony, tracing a line from

The canal to the mind, the mind to the eyes

Of the soul who wants to see the world, perceive

It, engage with it, restructure and rebuild it,

Stripping away the current buildings and bridges,

The layers of standing lies.  Move the world to

Where it was, to what it was and know it. Feel it.

Sense the emotion, the rocking violence, the hissing

Peacock within, who stands tall and resists the

Overwhelming intelligence, puffing out his

Chest, fluffing his brilliant plumage- the greens

The blues, as well as the shimmering, elusive

Purples, reds and browns. He shakes the feathers

 and reveals reality, the nonsense, the fictions:

the way we live and what we do.

btw- he was an insurance lawyer. 

Project Reflection and presentations and pleasure

I haven't posted a blog in awhile, but scrolling through my blog posts, I noticed about 5 or 6 incomplete drafts. They all started with an idea that exploded into a lot of chaotic baby ideas and then confusion. I really appreciated Eli's(?) presentation and his comments on Stevens' immensity, because I was getting really frustrated with the contradictions and all the directions we could go from his poems.  Too much and so little time.
In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, instead of posting blogs, I have been emailing my dad and talking on the phone with him about our class.  It wasn't to the same depth and degree as John Paul- we were taking things pretty lightly and then an idea started to emerge.
My dad is a lawyer, songwriter, writer and actor. When I was 12, he basically taught me how to write-- essays, stories, poems.  He does a lot of serious work, but he always takes pleasure in the things he writes or performs.  He especially loves parody.  When I was in high school, we always talked about doing a parody of children's show. And talking with him about my topic- children and Wallace Stevens, I thought why not do something we had joked about doing that would give pleasure (Because that note really stuck with me) I sent my dad pieces of rough draft script, and he'd send ideas back. I recruited artistic help from my friend, Sam Thomas (I sent her the poem and my concept, and she made some rough draft drawings and then finally a finished product) and help from my sister, Eva, who is a fan of photoshop, my husband Joe to act and at the last minute, I got my mom to make a special appearance in her bathrobe.  I'm basically a people user, but I'm a grateful one. So in case people didn't make it all the way to the credits, all those people I just mentioned deserve some props. 
I'm really thankful I got to do a project like this (and that I had people willing to help), because it was truly a pleasure to make.  I know my dad was so thrilled with it, he posted the first movie draft (without some edits and closed captioning) on Facebook the night we filmed it.  The comments he got on it were like:
"I don't know if I understand. . . " "What?" and "Very nice," "Fun" and Happy Thanksgiving (?).
 That made both of us happy.

Watching final presentations and reading blogs, I just wanted to say that those have been enjoyable too. I especially liked Nate's melding of Peter Pan and Wallace Stevens. It was brilliant- just like the colors of Jenny's paintings. I admire how some people like John Paul and Oranda took this class to such a personal, emotional level--so brave. I love the creativity in the stories from Arielle, Megan Anne. And then some people (Dusty, Breanna James)are just intimidating. And it all makes the last few days fun- pleasurable.

Final Project Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk6__OojaaQHere's the link.  I hope you enjoy it.

A comment on memorization/ my poem.

Last weekend, I started reading a book for my thesis/ for fun called "How to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child" by Anthony Esolen. It's a fantastic read, and it goes well with Stevens' "How to Live and What to Do."

I was particularly struck with the passage on memory.
The author claims that in order to do away with imagination, we have to get rid of "Facts"-- and the

"first thing is to keep the memory weak and empty. . .that is because a developed memory is a wondrous and terrible storehouse of things seen and heard and done.  It can do what no mere search engine on the internet can do.  It can call up apparently unrelated things at once, molding them into a whole impression, or a new thought. . . Without the library of the memory-- which the Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser compared to a dusty room full of wonders in the attic of the mind, where a wise old man pores over his books, and a little boy called Anamnesis, "Reminder," sometimes has to climb a ladder to go fetch them-- the imagination simply does not have much to think about, or to play with" or in my view, the imagination doesn't have enough of the "real" base it needs.

We have been charged with memorizing a poem, and for some weeks, we've heard people give examples, reciting poems for us and showing us why we memorize things and words; and at the time, I always felt I understood, but explaining it has been difficult.  

I like Esolen's explanation above, but I hope when I get into a classroom, I can do a better job, but the whole thing reminds me of an organization I heard about called, Poetry Out Loud-- it's a national recitation contest for high school kids.  They have to memorize three poems and they get judged based on the difficulty, the length and performance.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SvNPQUeiHs This is one from a girl reciting "The Emperor of Ice Cream"- just to give a taste of what they do. it definitely goes against Esolen's "How to."

Moving on-
My poem is Disillusionment of Ten O' Clock, and I memorized it at work (I seem to do a lot of Wallace Stevens work at the library), and my co-worker tested me.  I recited it and then waited.  He didn't say anything and didn't say anything, and I was wondering if I did something wrong- his eyes are darting around the page, and he finally says, "What?" He rereads it.  "What??!" This is the same guy, who discovered the "Well Dressed Man with a Beard" with me weeks ago.  He asked, "You have to memorize this? It doesn't mean anything." And then I had to laugh and tell him that was Wallace Stevens.  I don't have much else there.  I just thought it was funny.

Recognizing the fictions we live in as fiction

"We are in a Book" by Mo Willems.  It's Prospero addressing the audience.  It's Wallace Stevens and the sound of words. There never was a world for her except the one she sang-

And it gives pleasure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X93c86EYnco&feature=related

The poem as an Act

Poetry is. . . .   I've seen this unfinished sentence all my life in school and the answers usually range in the "poetry is a bunch of words, which have rhythm and is beautiful"  "Poetry is music" and "poetry is emotional."  It's a little different than "A poem is a meteor" "Poetry is not personal" "poetry is a means of redemption" "a poem is a pheasant." But I guess they are kind of similar too.

I was flipping through Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction and Stevens has things to say about what poetry is or what it has to be: 

It must be abstract
It must change
It must give pleasure

"but play you must,/ a tune beyond us, yet ourselves,/ a tune upon the blue guitar/ of things exactly as they are."

I cheated and threw in some Blue Guitar.   

"but to impose is not to discover. To discover an order as of a season, to discover summer and know it, to discover winter and know it well, to find, not to impose, not to have reasoned at all."


We've had some discussions about seeing thing for what they are and my mind floats from getting it and not getting it. Right now, I'm in the getting, because it's something I remember from a previous class-- to impose is not to discover, which came up in the Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction.  And I think we might have talked about it too. Stevens makes a distinction between people and poets, impositions and discoveries. A guy named Merle D. Brown talks about it in his book Wallace Stevens: the Poem as Act, and he says even though men and poets approach life in different ways, they kind of revolve around two things: change and feeling.

Merle says "fiction results from feeling." I took that as reaction. We create from our emotions- our desire. We may not always feel pleasure (not necessarily happiness) from a thing, but ordinary people can impose our desire for pleasure on something, while a poet looks deeper and finds the pleasure in the thing itself. It's imposition versus discovery, but both involve a kind of art. Change took Merle too long to explain, but I think he was saying that people are frightened of it and we try to stop it or control it with words, we seek to "impose orders to 'stop the whirlwind.'" Poets revel in change, but at the same time, they find themselves kind of stuck in repetition or permanence.  Or maybe not stuck, but they make an art of the patterns in changes or the changing patterns or something.  But I was thinking of this "change" in the romantic sense. And it took me here:

"Mutability," by William Wordsworth
From low to high doth dissolution climb,
And sink from high to low, along a scale
Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail:
A musical but melancholy chime,
Which they can hear who meddle not with crime,
Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care.
Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain
And is no more; drop like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear
His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time

Harmonium.  It's katabosis and anabosis.   Mrs. Alfred Uruguay. It's a seesaw.

In our discussion on Monday, I kept thinking of this toy. In its ascent and descent and in the very name.  "See" and "saw."   According to Wikipedia, the name comes from "a direct Anglicisation of the French ci-ça, meaning literally, this-that, seemingly attributable to the back-and-forth motion for which a seesaw is known." Neti, neti, except no not. I hope Wikipedia is telling the truth.

I never really liked these things (seesaws, not Wikipedia) when I was little, because my school's playground had really lame ones, but a few years back, I found a seesaw with a gigantic spring fulcrum and it was amazing, I mean my friend Emily and I got some serious height, but it's weird to think you could have so much fun on something that is so repetitive.  We go up and come back down over and over and over again. We know what's going to happen, but we're still excited to see the world from a new angle and then whoosh back down so we can launch again.  We see and then we saw and we do it again and the view is a little different each time.  There's a poetry to it. Or it is poetry, "the finding of a satisfaction, and may be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman combing, me seesawing.
The poem of the act of the mind"
        

Midnight musings-the universe is in knots

When I was a kid, I was up to date with all the trendy school yard games: state tag and kickball and double dutch (I couldn't actually do that one) and buttball and a recurring favorite cat's cradle. I remember playing that game for three hours with my best friend on a car ride and the string got tangled. I tried to pick it apart and somehow made it worse.  Every loop and knot I'd loosen would beget another knot until eventually I had a large mess of string. 

That's kind of how I feel about Wallace Stevens right now.  My mind's all jumbled about it, because everything connects, and everything is a lot of stuff to unpack.  Here's the strings I've got from tonight:

I was reading some blogs and I stumbled on Lace's post and poem, which was incredible. I thought her titles for post and poem were perfect-- "no words to describe it" "silence," described by words.  It's Beckett. Either “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness" or “Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."  It's the words- the words are all we have. (Beckett might have said something like that too).  To create illusions to create a "reality" to fill the void.  

It connects to Jenny's blog "Stirrings," which discusses the link she sees between Stevens and Beckett.   It connects to our discussion of God and the Bible-- It just occurred to me tonight that though we've been going through our blue bibles from the beginning onward, most of us are reading it like I've been taught to read the Christian Bible- sporadically. Walter was walking by the library counter tonight and asked what I was reading- I had flipped to "On the Road Home" two minutes earlier; and Walter was like, "We're already on Parts of a World?" and I said, "I think so, but I've just been skipping around."  And I thought that's the Bible for you. It's something that speaks to you or has something to say whereever you land in it; because it's life, the Word. The words of Lace's blog. After Walter left, I looked down at that "On the Road Home" and it took me right into Lace's blog, which seemed to originate on her journey home. 

The poem reads like this

On the Road Home
It was when I said,
"There is no such thing as the truth,"
That the grapes seemed fatter.
The fox ran out of his hole.

You. . . You said,
"There are many truths,
But they are not parts of a truth."
Then the tree, at night, began to change,

Smoking through green and smoking blue.
We were two figures in a wood.
We said we stood alone.

It was when I said,
"Words are not forms of a single word.
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. 
The world must be measured by eye";

It was when you said,
"The idols have seen lots of poverty,
Snakes and gold and lice,
But not the truth";

It was at that time, that the silence was largest 
And longest, the night was roundest,
The fragments of the autumn warmest,
Closest and strongest. 






I don't mean to say it's saying the same thing or is exactly the same, but something's there. 
Truth. Word. Silence.  

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' . . . "the way and the truth and the life"

And then things get messy with God, the Supreme Fiction and a little bit of Faust and fin de siecle and everything I'm doing, reading, seeing gets stuck in this cat's cradle of thoughts. It's like that video game called Katamari Damacy, where that little Prince tries to collect material for a new sky and planets and stuff (which had all been destroyed somehow, maybe by a drunkard) with a magic ball he rolls around. Smaller objects, like little squares and erasers, stick to the ball making it grow and collect bigger stuff, like people and later, cities.
My blue bible is the magic object and life is uprooted, revealing ideas of reality and imagination, turning me back to everything.
.